'Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his
savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for
nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of
men.'--MATT. v. 13.
These words must have seemed ridiculously presumptuous when they were
first spoken, and they have too often seemed mere mockery and irony in
the ages since. A Galilean peasant, with a few of his rude countrymen
who had gathered round him, stands up there on the mountain, and says to
them, 'You, a handful, are the people who are to keep the world from
rotting, and to bring it to all its best light.' Strange when we think
that Christ believed that these men were able to do these grand
functions because they drew their power from Himself! Stranger still to
think that, notwithstanding all the miserable inconsistencies of the
professing Church ever since, yet, on the whole, the experience of
history has verified these words! And although some wise men may curl
their lips with a sneer as they say about us Christians, '_Ye_ are the
salt of the earth!' yet the most progressive, and the most enlightened,
and the most moral portion of humanity has derived its impulse to
progress, its enlightenment as to the loftiest truths, and the purest
portion of its morality, from the men who received their power to impart
these from Jesus Christ.
And so, dear brethren, I have to say two or three things now, which I
hope will be plain and earnest and searching, about the function of the
Christian Church, and of each individual member of it, as set forth in
these words; about the solemn possibility that the qualification for
that function may go away from a man; about the grave question as to
whether such a loss can ever be repaired; and about the certain end of
the saltless salt.
I. First, then, as to the high task of Christ's disciples as here set
forth.
'Ye are the salt of the earth'! The metaphor wants very little
explanation, however much enforcement it may require. It involves two
things: a grave judgment as to the actual state of society, and a lofty
claim as to what Christ's followers are able to do to it.
A grave judgment as to the actual state of society--it is corrupt and
tending to corruption. You do not salt a living thing. You salt a dead
one that it may not be a rotting one. And, Christ says by implication
here, what He says plainly more than once in other places:--'Human
society, without My influence, is a carcass that is rotting away and
disintegrating; and you, faithful handful, who have partially
apprehended the meaning of My mission, and have caught something of the
spirit of My life, you are to be rubbed into that rotting mass to
sweeten it, to arrest decomposition, to stay corruption, to give flavour
to its insipidity, and to save it from falling to pieces of its own
wickedness. Ye are the _salt_ of the earth.'
Now, it is not merely because we are the bearers of a truth that will do
all this that we are thus spoken of, but we Christian men are to do it
by the influence of conduct and character.
There are two or three thoughts suggested by this metaphor. The chief
one is that of our power, and therefore our obligation, to arrest the
corruption round us, by our own purity. The presence of a good man
hinders the devil from having elbow-room to do his work. Do you and I
exercise a repressive influence (if we do not do anything better), so
that evil and low-toned life is ashamed to show itself in our presence,
and skulks back as do wrong-doers from the bull's-eye of a policeman's
lantern? It is not a high function, but it is a very necessary one, and
it is one that all Christian men and women ought to discharge--that of
rebuking and hindering the operation of corruption, even if they have
not the power to breathe a better spirit into the dead mass.
But the example of Christian men is not only repressive. It ought to
tempt forth all that is best and purest and highest in the people with
whom they come in contact. Every man who does right helps to make public
opinion in favour of doing right; and every man who lowers the standard
of morality in his own life helps to lower it in the community of which
he is a part. And so in a thousand ways that I have no need to dwell
upon here, the men that have Christ in their hearts and something of
Christ's conduct and character repeated in theirs are to be the
preserving and purifying influence in the midst of this corrupt world.
There are two other points that I name, and do not enlarge upon. The
first of them is--salt does its work by being brought into close contact
with the substance upon which it is to work. And so we, brought into
contact as we are with much evil and wickedness, by many common
relations of friendship, of kindred, of business, of proximity, of
citizenship, and the like,--we are not to seek to withdraw ourselves
from contact with the evil. The only way by which the salt can purify is
by being rubbed into the corrupted thing.
And once more, salt does its work silently, inconspicuously, gradually.
'Ye are the light of the world,' says Christ in the next verse. Light is
far-reaching and brilliant, flashing that it may be seen. That is one
side of Christian work, the side that most of us like best, the
conspicuous kind of it. Ay! but there is a very much humbler, and, as I
fancy, a very much more useful, kind of work that we have all to do. We
shall never be the 'light of the world,' except on condition of being
'the salt of the earth.' You have to play the humble, inconspicuous,
silent part of checking corruption by a pure example before you can
aspire to play the other part of raying out light into the darkness, and
so drawing men to Christ Himself.
Now, brethren, why do I repeat all these common, threadbare platitudes,
as I know they are? Simply in order to plant upon them this one question
to the heart and conscience of you Christian men and women:--Is there
anything in your life that makes this text, in its application to you,
other else than the bitterest mockery?